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Except that any personal site HAS to have their 'correct info' there, and any hint of 'commercialism' (such as linking to 'trading sites') and that private info - your home address - is now going to be published.
I bet no-one can see absolutely ANYTHING wrong with that at all.... like pizza-bombing or SWATing (SO19-ing?) someone. Because that never EVER happens.

Right. The European Union has completely different privacy rules for individuals and businesses. For individuals, there's the European Privacy Directive, which gives Europeans much stronger privacy rights than in the US. For businesses, it's completely different. Online businesses face the European Electronic Commerce Directive, and have to disclose who's behind the business.

That's deliberate EU policy. The whole point of the single European market is to make it easy to buy and sell across national boundaries within the EU. So there are lots of EU rules which benefit consumers and prevent businesses from operating in the country with the weakest regulation.

The.us domain registrar doesn't allow anonymous registration, either. Actually, neither does ICANN. The registrant listed in Whois owns the domain. If that's some "private registration" front, they own the domain. This became a big deal when RegisterFly tanked and people with "private registration" discovered they really didn't own domains they thought were theirs. That took months to straighten out.

You forget that the details being available is where things started, and the option for details to be hidden showed up because of the problems having that information openly available has caused. The "social will" you talk about is not society at at large, it is governments and law enforcement wanting that information out in the open for their own purposes. General society either outright prefers the ability to remain anonymous or could give a crap about the details being shown except in very specific cases.

Having a website in no way equates to driving a car, that is a ridiculous analogy. Your driver's license is not openly available to millions at any given time, and a website is not a large vehicle that can be driven into a crowd of actual flesh and blood people. And if the service provider has monopoly, where exactly do you take your business?

The government requires people to either A. purchase specific goods and services from private companies or B. go to prison. Indecent exposure laws require purchase of clothing. Vagrancy laws require owning or leasing a home. And universal healthcare laws require either buying private health insurance or making less than the poverty line.

Those who call for an end to privacy, usually have something to gain from it.

Except that a lot of people who call for an end to privacy have nothing to gain and actually lose. ESR is one of those people, and I had to drop him from my G+ circles because I just couldn't stand the cognitive dissonance (doublethink, if we're going to use Orwell) any longer.

Pray tell, which ones? None of the ones I use. Even online services that "require" a cell number really don't - they put in grayed out text a clickthrough to skip it, even Facebook.

If you're talking about banking and payment services, they've required your real identity in meatspace for hundreds of years, so it's not the same thing as what we're discussing here. All online services have unenforceable and unconscionable terms and conditions. I can require

In theory you have the option of just not using water. Collect rain or buy bottled - you might need to get a chemical toilet or dig a hole in the garden, but someone might go to such lengths in protest. I didn't even get that: The water company is also the drainage company, and charge for the service of removing the water that falls on any land you own. Unless you can somehow stop it from raining, you have to pay.

In California, collecting rainwater is actually illegal. The water is owned by the city or state, or whoever, but not the homeowner.

But the whole premise of the argument is flawed. Although people pay for water to be delivered through pipes to their hoses, the largest cost that the bills cover is actually the removal and treatment of wastewater. So, yes, buy all your water in bottles, but then don't allow any water to go down your drai

The water rights aren't necessarily owned by the government, but by the people downstream who were using the water before you [wikipedia.org]—maybe a municipal water system, but just as likely a farmer, an industrial plant, etc. By capturing rainwater you would be infringing on their private property rights in that water.

Colorado, in 2009, began issuing permits for residential rainwater collection, in part because of a study that showed that in some locations most rainwater evaporated or was used by plants before

You can eliminate wastewater disposal with a bit of replumbing - if you need to, get a septic tank. But how can you stop it from raining?

Somewere I'm sure you can find a place where not only does the water company own the rain that falls on your property, but you've not choice but to pay them to take it away and pay them again to get it back.

mine address is in whois for every domain I own; sure there are a couple major shoddy registrars that will put in their address instead of yours for your domains but they completely suck for other reasons.

causal ones also less healthy for target by not promoting elevated heart and breathing rates and fleeing. Role of increased mental stimulation in helping staving off neural senescence or senility can't be ignored either

I work with a school. I occasionally give students the address of my server, as I've a couple of utilities up there I made for use in IT classes (A public-domain* music collection, a utility to make rollover graphics). I can't risk students finding out my home address! I'd get a brick through my window for all the games sites I blocked.

That's fine if you are prepared to pay the large cost for DbP and never want to change registrars. I had some domains at Godaddy with DbP protection. I found that to move to another registrar, I had to first remove the domains from DbP, thus making the whois information public for a few hours during the transfer.

They always looked to have avoided the commercialisation of other country/international DNS services, but having known someone who crawled their way into the hierarchy with little knowledge of the system but an excellent politician, I learned that really they're just the same as any Verizon but with less honesty about how they operate.

This aside, the Nominet position has always been to require honest data but to allow people operating non-commercially to hide their information from whois. On the latter, fra

The main problem is the constant 'goal shifting'. First it was because there was a widget link to Amazon for my book [slashdot.org]
I disabled it
Then it was "I had google adverts". I disabled them.
Then I had 'lots of links to trading sites" and "email subscription module"
And then I filed a complaint for being absurd, and so the next morning they published my home address.
UK Gov calls a business anything that makes a profit. It also accepts that hobbies can bring in some money, but when it becomes profitable, then it's not a business and is a hobby.
Nominet calls a site commercial based on the "I'll know it when I see it" standard, with an extremist mindset.To quote the 'senior Nominet Customer advisor' who was chosen to deal with this case,

I would like to agree with a point you raised 'pretty much ANY website is a 'trading website''. This is the case and it's rare that a.uk domain name is able to opt-out of having their address details displayed.

It's the same as indecency. What's acceptable to one, may be offensive to another. Should we go to the extremist view, 'skin showing is indecent' to appease the extremists, or should things reflect societal norms? Like 'all skin is indecent', anything involving anything commercial, even at one remove, makes this site commercial' is an extremist view.
Does linking to your twitter profile, or a facebook page make you 'commercial'? Just read a good book, and wanted to share that on your site, with a link to where you can buy it means you're a business? Nominet says so. is that normal in the current state of society?

Perhaps it depends on the person at Nominet who assesses the site, or perhaps the goalposts have moved. I once reported a site to Nominet for blocked Whois information because the site was promoting a product, although actual puchases were made through another (linked) site. Nothing happened. The site remained as "The registrant is a non-trading individual", even though it clearly was not.

I was first told that stuff by their 'front line' staff (who turned out to have only worked for Nominet since March, all her pervious work was working in clothing stores, or as a hairdresser, except for a brief period as a software salesperson (her public linkedin profile is at the bottom of the 3rd link)

That quote is by their 'second level' support, who took over the issue at the direction of the acting customer service head, following my complaint.

Every single domain should have accurate and verifiable information for the owner, administrative, and technical contacts. The use of services which anonymize or mask domain owners should be prohibited.Whois was intended to enable you to identify the ownership of a domain and who to contact about it.

Every single domain should have accurate and verifiable information for the owner, administrative, and technical contacts. The use of services which anonymize or mask domain owners should be prohibited

That's a nice polemic statement, completely unsupported by any evidence supporting why making the information public is a good idea.

Because domain generation is one of the most basic techniques used by malware authors and phishers to organize their attacks, as exemplified in the stone age by fast flux networks, Rock Phish, and Conficker, and in modern cases by Kelihos and most of the crap on Zeus networks. Because when a floor has to figure out what's going on with an address, the first thing they do is look up information on whois, which is already a poorly organized hot mess and the problem is further exacerbated by inaccurate info,

And yeah, who eneds privacy because it makes some 'investigator's job hard. I'm pretty sure we can knock crime on the head if we throw privacy out of the window and abolish pesky things like 'search warrants'.
In fact, let's do just what you say in meatspace - lets lock down cities, and then send squads of cops door-to-door in every town. We'll clean up the 'crime' that's there, and there won't have to do any petty investigating. orangina's all around!

Yet that domain name is just an entry in a database, pretty meaningless in reality and totally controlled by where an end user DNS points. You can see the day coming, with the end of Net Neutrality where major multi-national ISPs decide that all the domain name money is theirs and route all traffic to their DNS servers and unless you pay them, your domain name no longer exist, it will be in their EULA, that the end user most use the ISPs domain name servers, or pay extra as a result of the extra cost of us

read the last link,
Anyway, Nominet is demanding ID to 'validate' names, even though under UK law, pseudonyms not designed to deceive are legal for use, else they sieze the domains. They do this despite accepting the pseudnym and the legal right to use one in the UK, and the identity of the person in the case (me)
Basically, if you have a UK domain, and they can't 'verify' you in the big brother databases, you got to send them ID now.